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Fair Trade Commission designates companies with assets of 5 trillion won or more as large corporations each year, and also determines the total number of the same person who actually controls the company. This is to prevent concentration of economic power by imposing disclosure obligations on transactions with specially related persons such as spouses and relatives to the head.



This year's interest was Coupang. In fact, it was the FTC's concern that Chairman Kim Bum-suk, who exercised voting rights, was an American national, and eventually decided to designate the Coupang corporation as the same person instead of Chairman Kim Bum-suk.



There is a controversy, and reporter Lee Seong-hoon scrutinized it.



<Reporter>



Coupang holds a 10.2% stake in Coupang, which is owned by U.S. chairman Kim Bum-seok, but is exercising 76.7% of the voting rights thanks to 29 times the differential voting rights per share.



Chairman Kim actually controls Coupang, and the FTC has designated the Korean Coupang subsidiary as the same person, not Chairman Kim.



This is why there is no precedent for specifying foreigners as the total number, and it is difficult to sanction foreigners under the current law, which is why it is not effective.



Even if Chairman Kim is not designated as the total number, it is believed that there is no possibility of a regulatory blind spot.



[Kim Jae-shin/Vice Chairman of the Fair Trade Commission: Will Chairman Beom-Seok Kim create a new company that does not exist now, and will his relatives establish a new company and deal with them in the future? We see that there is no possibility... .]



But the argument for equity still remains.



It is argued that it is the reverse discrimination of domestic companies that freed them from the obligation to disclose transactions of relatives as foreigners while acknowledging substantial control over the total number of companies that make most of their sales in Korea.



[Park Sang-in/Professor, Graduate School of Public Administration, Seoul National University: With this decision, the regulation of private interests could be neutralized. Furthermore, there is a very problem in that it has given the incentive to shake the same-person regulation itself… .]



Furthermore, there are criticisms that the total number system introduced in the 80s is not suitable for the rapidly growing IT companies.



The FTC also acknowledged the limitations of the current law and announced that it would improve the overall designation system for the same person.



(Video editing: Lee Seung-yeol, VJ: Jung Min-gu)